[mplspm]: Submitting patches to module maintainers

David Blevins dmblevins at mediaone.net
Thu Jan 31 10:36:18 CST 2002


>From experience, I can say everything James said is true.

I had been running my project (OpenEJB) at a cvs/mailinglist/website only
host for two years.  I just moved it to SourceForge about three weeks
ago...heaven, pure heaven!

We definitely use the bug and patch tracking system.  I use the task
tracking system like crazy, for myself and the team.  I even whipped up a
perl script Tuesday to reformat task emails to our development list so
everyone can see who is doing what.  It's in our cvs, if you are interested.
Keep in mind, I'm not much of a perl programmer.

One of the best this about SourceForge is no longer having to support people
with cvs problems!

Newbie: "Dear sir, cvs give me error, please advise."
Me: "Dear list member, you can submit a SF support request at...."

Nice.

-David



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-mpls at pm.org [mailto:owner-mpls at pm.org]On Behalf Of
> James.FitzGibbon
> Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 8:16 AM
> To: Minneapolis Perl Mongers (E-mail)
> Subject: [mplspm]: Submitting patches to module maintainers
>
>
> At last night's meeting, there was a point raised about maintainers
> of open source projects and getting them to actually incorporate them
> into future releases.  I had an idea on the way home that I wanted to
> bounce off people.
>
> I think one of the big problems with reporting bugs and submitting
> patches is that a) a single email reporting a bug is easily deleted
> and forgotten (hopefully not on purpose) and b) if you are too busy
> to incorporate the patch, it's difficult to delegate that task to
> someone else.
>
> Hopefully most people are familiar with SourceForge, the Open-Source
> project hosting site where you can start an Open Source project and
> have access to a private CVS repository, web space, the ability to
> release tarballs, mailing lists, bug reporting, etc.  If you're not
> familiar, please check out www.sf.net.
>
> The idea I had was to promote the idea of getting module developers
> to host their modules on SourceForge.  That way when a bug is reported
> it goes into the tracking database for that module and the author can't
> just indiscriminately delete it.  The author could also start discussion
> groups so that potential patch submitters could bounce their ideas off
> of other users of the module before sending the final patch to the
> author.
>
> Best of all, if the author needed to take a temporary hiatus, it would
> be easy to give CVS commit access to a trusted lieutenant who could
> take on the task of committing patches.  When the author was ready to
> come back, they would be able to track the exact changes that had taken
> place in their absence with CVS.
>
> These arguments of course apply to all Open Source projects, not
> just Perl.
> The benefits are (I would argue) required when a project reaches a certain
> size, and with the exception of large modules like Event, DBI,
> Mason, etc.,
> people may not have thought about using something like SF for this.
>
> Discuss?
>
> --
> j.
>
> James FitzGibbon                       voice/fax 612-761-6121/4277
> Consultant, TTS-3D at TPN4H               james.fitzgibbon at target.com
>
>
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